Article

Batteries

While warmer temperatures help to increase battery capacity, making it easier to turn over the engine, they also cause an increase in the rate at which the battery deteriorates. When the temperature is warmer, the current conducting grids corrode faster, reducing the life of your battery.

Bruce Purkey knows where the electrons go. And, as president of Purkey’s Fleet Electric and his many activities in the Technology & Maintenance Council of the American Trucking Associations, he’s well aware that some of them flow to batteries that support the electric-over-hydraulic systems for liftgates on trucks and trailers. Usually there are two and as many as four Group 31 batteries, like the ones on a truck or tractor.

We have to stop thinking of our start/charge systems as simply a handful of separate components, and start viewing them as a system. From alternators to batteries and starters, cables and regulators, and even add-on components like low-voltage cut-off switches and DC/AV inverters, each can impact the component next to it.

Power inverters – the devices that convert standard battery (DC) power to AC household power – are becoming more commonplace in the trucking industry. Depending upon whom you ask, that’s to the delight, or chagrin of fleet and maintenance managers, who often have a love/hate relationship with inverters.

Next to the clang of your cell door slamming shut, there are few sounds more disheartening than the "click, click, click" of a starter that's not getting enough juice. Maxwell Technologies' Engine Start Module is an ultracapacitor starting system that can prevent that.

Uptime and utilization are everything, so you don't want a truck sitting on the shop floor during basic battery maintenance. Most fleets pull the batteries at the first sign of trouble and replace them with fresh batteries to get the truck moving again, planning to deal with the bad batteries later.
But what killed the batteries in the first place